How do I choose a good laptop battery?

are you sure its the battery?

and not the power jack?

if you take the battery out does it run off the charger?

check if you can buy the battery directly from sony

will be more expensive but at least you will know you have got a genuine battery

If you want to chance an off brand then read the reviews. All I can say is look for ones with the highest review ratings. Read some of the positive reviews just to get an idea, but focus on the 1 and 2 star reviews for potential issues.

hha, i just have the problem with recently, My HP DV4 laptop battery has broke but i am not willing to buy a new one, so i search around at amazon, because of the BF, so i see a lot of great selling, after detail looking , i decided to buy ravpower dv4 battery, i already received my battery , so far so good, you could try this, i better they must have sony battery

I bought a DELL battery from Ravpower on Amazon a while ago when it was on special for $9.99. Everything seems to be very good. Didn't notice any difference with the stock battery. Just look for a battery with good review rating on Amazon and you should be fine.

I too was wary of buying an off brand so i did a bit of research. How? I contacted a few aftermarket manufacturers: Lenmar, Arclyte and Anker. All ,except for Arclyte, took forever to reply and were very reluctant in giving me information. I asked where they manufacture their batteries, their battery technology, accreditations/certifications, safety, etc.

I felt the most comfortable with Arclyte since they have their certifications in place were most interested in helping me out versus making a sale and use the "latest and safest" battery technologies available. I was still iffy so i ordered two batteries, one for my Dell Precision M4400 and for my Dell Latitude D631. They shipped the following day, I ordered at 8pm and arrived to me in 2 days. Installed the two and they both worked fine. It's now been almost 10 months and I've had zero problems with Arclyte batteries. They are not the cheapest batteries but the quality is pretty good. They both feel sturdy, well built and run great. You get what you pay for guys.

The quality of a laptop battery is determined primarily by a few factors. Capacity of the cells, designed service life, and safety features incorporated into the battery.

A typical 6 cell battery bought from Dell rates at 5200mAh/56Wh and uses cells from Sony,Samsung and LG. All of these major manufacture incorporate both performance newer and safety aspects into their design and would be expected to last about 600 charging cycles or 2 years with good battery life maintained for a long period.

The cheaper off brands use generic cells that only rate at 4400mAh/47Wh and will only last 300 charging cycles or about 1 year. These cells also lack the newest safety feature and would not pass UL1642 certification. A general rule of thumb is if the battery is less $50-60 expect 1-1/2 years of service life and 1 1/2 to 2 hours of runtime for your laptop for the first 6 months. After that probably 1hr to 45 minutes as the battery ages.

Basically, those eye popping low prices are achieved by stripping out service life, power capacity, and safety features.

Also, note that laptop batteries are like produce and the cells degrade over time even if they are not used. A battery that sits in a warehouse waiting to be sold will have lost around 30% of both service life and capacity. This is the case with most batteries that are sold on Amazon and ebay and are under 30 bucks. The older stock is sold at a steep discount because they are going bad.

One of the best batteries that I have run across is made by Max Capacity. Our IT dept uses them and it basically how I found out the information a stated here. The batteries they make use cells made by Panasonic and are rated at 5800mAh/63Wh or more. That equated to almost 50% more runtime than a 4400mAh cell and last about 700-800 charging cycles or about 3 years. They basically out perform and outlast even the OEM.

Examples of these batteries can be found at http://SafeBatteries.com and typically cost ~ $70-$80 bucks.

Hope this helped.

Cheers,
Bart